I'm sure you're right, this was just a quick test batch to see how it goes and I don't want to be up all night. I want to have it nailed down by the beginning of November, so I'll be doing lots of tests. Plus I'll do some during the day when it's warmer, that should help!

So, I smoked my first cheese with the ProQ cold smoker tonight, roughly a pound of Tillamook cheddar. It's a bit chilly here right now so the smoking happened at 53F, quite a bit colder than ideal. After 3 hours of smoking with hickory dust the cheese has a very mild flavor. I'm going to let it sit in the fridge for a day or so and taste it again. It tastes good and everything, but the smoke is more mild than I'd like it.

I think if it had been warmer it would have softened the cheese and so it would have absorbed the smoke flavor better, but maybe I'm making that up. Maybe the smoke box is too big for best results, I don't really know.

I'd post a pic, but it just looks like a couple of blocks of cheese. No smoke marks or browning or anything like that.

So your crock is on a small cart so you can move around during the party?

Hilarious

I'm a big fan of smoked paprika, and use it in a few crock pot dishes. It gets me smokiness in my chili without the heat from using chipotles, so the family is still able to eat it.

One of my favorite crock pot dishes is red cooked chicken. You mix equal parts of soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine, and water or broth. Add some sliced ginger, green onions, and some star anise. I like to throw in some Szechuan peppercorns too. You can boil all of that for a few minutes and strain it, or just throw it all into the slow cooker. Make sure it's enough to cover the chicken, then cook it on low until it's done. Serve it with some of the sauce and some minced green onion for dipping.

Take the remaining sauce and boil it for a few minutes, then chill it and freeze it. Use the sauce over and over again, it picks up flavor and gets more complex the more you use it. You can freshen it now and then with more herbs/spices, and you'll have to top it up periodically with more soy/water/cooking wine.

You can also do this on the stovetop - bring the liquid to a boil, add the chicken, return to boiling. Boil 10 minutes, then cover and remove from heat. Let it sit in the liquid another 15 minutes and it's ready to serve. Delicious.

Actually, boiling will remove some of the oakiness so the beer is now less oaky than it would have otherwise been. I know guys who cook their oak chips in a pressure cooker and then just add the liquid to the beer.

The key here is really contact time based on surface/volume ratio. Because of the larger surface area of chips, they need to spend a lot less time in the beer than cubes would in the same volume of beer to impart the same amount of oakiness. Similarly, a barrel has less surface area per volume, so you age in a barrel for longer.

Anyway, the best way to solve the problem is to blend it with another beer. If it is extremely oaky then you might just add a little bit to a batch to get the oak level you want. Experiment in a glass before you go blending it 50/50 with something, or you might end up with 10 gallons of beer that is too oaky. You can brew another DIPA, an IPA, or PA to blend it with. It could be really nice with an Imperial Stout too, or lots of other styles depending on how much you need to add to get the oak level you want.

Thanks for the info - it would be great to get the pure strains at some point, but I'm not in any rush really. If someone has a sample they'd like to trade I'd be cool with that. I'll just stick it in the -80 at work for later use . . .

How can you guys measure boiloff in %? When you double your batch size, do you boil off twice as much? I know that I don't!

Amount of volume, and it agrees with promash in %/hour.It would be the same for a big batch vs small batch if I calculated in gallons/hour, as the BTU input is the same (assuming constant atm. pressure and relative humidity).

Or I could be missing something.

I think Denny's point was that you don't measure the percent, you calculate percent and it will vary by batch size. Gallons/hour is a better way of reporting your boil-off rate.

You bring up a point that we often forget...not everyone has the same situation! In your case in that apartment, it seems there really was no alternative. When you have a dedicated brew garage like I have, you tend to forget that not everyone is so lucky.

No realistic alternatives anyway I try not to forget I'm lucky to have the setup I do, even if it's not as nice as some other people's. And having a supportive wife who understands and accepts (mostly) that she will never park the car in the garage helps too

I understand your point about seasonal brewing, but dammit, I want what I want when I want it! Putting my fermenter in a tub of water in an interior closet and adding ice packs, I can maintain 65-70 with an ambient of 85-90.

I lived in a 285 sqft studio apartment for a year or so shortly after I moved to Seattle. It didn't keep me from having 5 batches in progress at one time, but I didn't have an interior closet - it was a closet Plus the building didn't have AC, and the apartment got the late afternoon sun and no possibility of a cross breeeze. Summer was sweaty. Plus when it was a nice summer weekend I typically went camping (you have to take advantage of the weather) but that meant I wasn't there to change ice in a tub either. Seasonal brewing was really the best way to go for me, in that place, at that time.

That got old though, now I have some temperature controlled options so I can do whatever I want when I want.

I do the opposite. I base yeast choice on the flavor profile I want in the beer, then adjust the fermentation environment accordingly.

That's what I do too, but if you can't control your fermentation temps then picking a yeast based on the prevailing conditions makes sense.

Don't you mean "if you WON'T control your temps"? Almost anyone should be able to control their temps if they want to.

No, I mean can't although I might add the word "sufficiently". If it's 85F in your house a swamp cooler is only going to get you so far. And seriously, how often do we see people on this board recommend kolsch or California lager yeasts for someone wants to make a German lager but can't reliably get their temps down low enough? That is the same thing. I know there are lots of ways to bring temps down, but they're not all realistic for everyone, whether because of money, space, SWMBO, or other considerations.

And to your point Denny, if you want to make an APA you might want to wait until the temp comes down and make saisons in the summer. Seasonal brewing was the standard for centuries, pretty sure we all know that.

<edited because the first read through sounded a little angry - I'm not >